Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett was born December 2, 1963^[2] in Los Angeles, to Frank Patchett (a Los Angeles police captain who arrested Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan^[9]) and Jeanne Ray (a nurse who later became a novelist).^[10] She is the younger of two daughters. Her parents divorced when she was young. Her mother remarried and when Patchett was six years old the family moved to Nashville.^[11] She has described her stepfather as a "very, very weird guy" who had her carry a gun as early as age sixteen, and she partially attributes her disinterest in texting to his forcing her mother to carry a pager and respond to him on demand.^[12]

Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville run by the Sisters of Mercy.^[5][6] After graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.^[13][6]

After college, she attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she lived with the memoirist and poet Lucy Grealy. Their time as roommates and their life-long friendship was the subject of her 2004 memoir Truth & Beauty. She married in her early twenties, but the marriage lasted only about a year.^[14]

Patchett won a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts in her late twenties;^[5] during her time there she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, published in 1992.^[5][10] In 2010, she co-founded the bookstore Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes, in Nashville. It opened in November 2011.^[15] In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile expanding the reach of the bookstore in Nashville.^[16] Patchett lives in Nashville with her husband, Karl VanDevender.^[17][18]

Patchett's first published work was in The Paris Review, a story which appeared before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.^[10] For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine,^[5] where she wrote primarily non-fiction. The magazine only published one of every five articles she wrote. She ended her relationship with the magazine after getting into a dispute with an editor and exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"^[5]

Patchett has written for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, O, The Oprah Magazine, ELLE, GQ, Gourmet, and Vogue.^[13] In 1992, she published The Patron Saint of Liars.^[6] The novel was made into a television movie of the same title in 1998.^[19] Her second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994.^[6] Her third novel, The Magician’s Assistant, was released in 1997.^[20] In 2001, she achieved a breakthrough with her fourth novel Bel Canto, becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist^[21] and winning the PEN/Faulkner Award.^[3]

A friend of writer Lucy Grealy, Patchett wrote a memoir about their relationship, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. Patchett's novel, Run,^[7] was released in October 2007. What Now?, published in April 2008, is an essay based on a commencement speech she delivered at her alma mater in 2006. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories.^[22] In 2011, she published State of Wonder, a novel set in the Amazon jungle, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.^[4][23] In 2016 she published the novel Commonwealth to widespread critical acclaim. Patchett called the book her "autobiographical first novel," explaining, “The wonderful thing about publishing this book at 52 is that I know that I am [already] capable of working from a place of deep imagination.”^[24]

In 2019, Patchett published her first children's book, Lambslide,^[25] and the novel The Dutch House,^[26] a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.^[27] In November 2021, she published These Precious Days, an essay collection. In 2023, Ann Patchett published a novel called Tom Lake, and it made The New York Times Best Seller list.^[28]

When asked how to encourage people to slow down and contemplate more during a 2024 interview for the BBC, she responded:^[29]

Wouldn't it be lovely if people sat quietly for longer periods of time?... I do, because I write novels for a living... I'm very, very careful with myself because I don't want anything to disrupt my ability to concentrate on one thing for long periods of time. To that end, I do not watch television under any circumstances, I do not have a cell phone, and I participate in no form of social media. I have never looked at Facebook. That's kind of interesting, because my bookstore has a huge social media presence and I make videos about the books that I'm reading, but I never watch them.

Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.^[30]